Crisis care letter follow-up swamped by Trump headlines

I see the Select Committee chairs have sent a frank letter to Theresa May urging action to tackle the social care crisis. Their biggest fear, it appears, is that the Brexit circus will crowd out ‘domestic policy.’

Not a chance, I say.

There’s only one headline maker out there at the moment and that’s the Prime Minister’s new American ‘friend’, Donald Trump.

I can recall my seniors shouting at the television, offering running commentary on everything from the news and football referee decisions to the latest saga with long-departed Ena Sharples of Coronation Street.

This weekend I was almost doing the same as Trump seemed to fill every waking hour of newsfeed time. Of course, I’m not decrying that his game-changer on the world stage is not newsworthy, but . . . on home soil the critical nature of the social/NHS care latest seems to have fallen below the radar.

Mrs May must still be under a deal of pressure over the correspondence from three of the most influential Commons select committees urging her to seek a rapid cross-party consensus on the “immense challenge” of paying for health and social care in the future.

But the media frenzy has now a new focus and she must be secretly breathing a sigh of relief – albeit for a just a little while.

The letter – sent jointly by the Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston, of the health committee, Labour MP Meg Hillier, of the public accounts committee and Clive Betts, also a Labour MP, of the communities and local government committee, highlights fears that pressing issues at home are being put on the back burner.

“We are calling for a new political consensus to take this forward,” the letter reads (Guardian). “This needs to be done swiftly so that agreement can be reflected in the next spending round.”

The MPs maintain that any review should target both the health and social care systems, warning that separation of the two is “creating difficulties for individuals and avoidable barriers and inefficiencies”.

Not surprisingly, Mrs May was accused of failing to grasp the scale of the challenge, after the chancellor Philip Hammond ignored the care sector in his autumn statement last November.

And then of course, we had the announcement from Downing Street that local authorities would be able to increase taxers to sort out short-term needs. Bit of a knee-jerk response to associations like mine, I suspect.

The political consensus appears to put the blame for everything at the Brexit door. As the Guardian reported: “The intellectual energy will go into Brexit, the most ambitious civil servants will want to be in the Brexit departments; it will just be the focus of everything.”

The letter concludes: “In short, the problem is widely recognised – we now need political agreement so that a solution for the long term can be found. For our part we shall do what we can to contribute to a consensus. We look forward to hearing from you.”

Backing for the letter has come from The King’s Fund and the Local Government Association.